


Inconsequential

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, The Sentinel Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:20:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim wonders how Blair can get in so much trouble so fast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inconsequential

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BrynnH87](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrynnH87/gifts).



> Written for the TS 2012 Secret Santa for Brynn. Thank you to Merlin for beta.

When the phone went, Jim rolled his eyes. Blair was barely out the door, on the way to some new age friend’s summer solstice party, and Jim was anticipating a quiet evening - a shower, a beer, his choice of what was on tv, peace and quiet in the long summer twilight. It was a temptation to simply leave the phone to ring, but then Jim picked up. “Ellison,” he said impatiently.

“Hey, hey man.” It was Blair’s voice, weak and weirdly controlled. “Good to hear your dulcet growl.”

“Sandburg?” The summer’s end-of-day peace was replaced with nervous chill. “What’s happened?” Because something, clearly, had happened. Blair’s voice was all wrong.

“Evening is completely fubared, that’s what. Take a breath, sit down, actually don’t sit down, you probably want to use your cop contacts to figure out what hospital they’ll take me to. God, I hope it’s Cascade General, everyone knows that the ER at Mercy is the biggest piece of shit.”

“Sandburg, tell me what happened. Now.”

“Sorry, I talk when I’m anxious, and I’m definitely kind of anxious right now.” The burn of anticipation for the coming bad news was starting to curdle Jim’s guts. He barely restrained himself from snapping ‘Get _on_ with it, Sandburg.’ “So. Okay, the thing is that I’ve been stabbed. But it’s fine, it’s fine, the emergency services are on their way, and there’s this really nice woman called Barbara helping me out, but I figured that you might want to know.”

“That you’ve been stabbed,” Jim snapped, nodding his head in a crazy affirmative that yes, he would absolutely like to know that. “Where are you?”

“That little Chinese grocery store on River Road. They had a special on those sesame candies, you know, the ones-”

“I’m on my way,” Jim said, and hung up. The acts of gathering his car keys and wallet and pelting down the stairs to the street to the spot where Jim had parked the truck took place with a strained efficiency. But as he pulled out onto the road, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t efficient, it didn’t matter that Blair couldn’t hear him. “Sandburg,” Jim enquired of the truck’s interior, his voice amplified by frustrated anger, “River Road is barely five minutes from here. How the _hell_ do you get in this much trouble this fast?”

~*~

Jim beat the ambulance there, although not his fellow police officers. A middle-aged Asian woman was talking to one patrolman, her face taut with pain and the dregs of adrenaline. There was blood from a puncture wound on her face below her eye socket. Another patrolman leaned over Blair, who was propped up on the floor against the counter with an elderly Asian woman beside him, her hand pressed against his side.

Jim’s legs took on their quickest, longest stride, and the patrolman turned in alarm, before Blair’s relieved expression and Jim’s presentation of his badge calmed him.

“You want to tell me what happened here?” Jim demanded of the uniform guy; Devereaux according to the name tag. Blair mouthed something at him that looked like ‘I told you what happened.’ Once his eyes were fixed on Jim’s face they didn’t look away, and Jim barely managed to break his own stare to pay attention to the answer to his question.

Devereaux frowned. “Robbery. And this guy tried to intervene when the robber threatened the store manager.” 

“Ambulance is on its way?” Jim asked. The guy was young, as they often seemed to be these days; just a baby, younger than Blair.

“When the store manager called it in.”

“I can watch him.” Jim could hear the sirens – it wouldn’t be long. “You’ll have things to do.”

Devereaux stared at Jim, unsure for a moment, and then at Blair. He nodded and stood. “I’ll leave you to it, Detective.”

Jim barely registered him going. He knelt beside Blair and pushed a strand of hair back from his face, which was scarily pale. He smiled at his friend, hoping that the reassurance he was trying to communicate came across untinged by the little thread of dark panic in Jim’s gut. 

“Playing hero again, Chief?”

Blair’s answering smile was thin and tired. “Nah. Just a misunderstanding, that’s all.” He was breathing very shallowly, on purpose, Jim realised; guarding his wound. That would have told Jim plenty, if his nose hadn’t picked up the faint scent of shit mixed with the blood and fear stink that rose off Blair. The bastard with the knife had done serious damage. Then Blair’s smile widened in relief. “Hey, are those my sirens?” he asked.

Jim nodded. “Your fast track ride to pretty nurses is on the way.” Jim turned to the woman, who remained kneeling at Blair’s side, steadily pressing what looked like a blue and white striped towel against his side. “You must be Barbara,” he said. “I’m Detective Jim Ellison.”

“Blair’s friend, yes.” Her voice was precise and neat, like the rest of her. She appeared unfazed by the blood all over her previously immaculate pant suit. Jim was very grateful for Barbara right now. 

“You’re doing great, Barbara.” She nodded, a small frown of concentration creasing her forehead. Jim took Blair’s hand, holding it firmly, hoping that his own strength could somehow counteract the weakness of Blair’s grasp. “How about you, Chief?”

Blair swallowed. “You know how it is. So long as I don’t move or talk or breathe, I’m great.”

“Yeah, I know exactly how it is. Ambulance has just gone past the intersection at Norton Street, Chief. They’re nearly here.” 

Blair’s eyebrows lifted. “You know exactly? Holding out on me, man.” So Blair’s mind was still sharp enough to note the hint. Jim grinned, a broad smug smile that he knew would annoy his friend.

“I’ll tell you the story to while away your convalescence.” ‘So make sure that you have a convalescence,’ was the unspoken bargain. Plenty of people survived a knife in the guts. Blair would be one of them. That was what Jim told himself, and he reinforced the message with a careful squeeze of Blair’s hand. 

The squeeze was returned. “You bet you will,” Blair commanded, inquisitively imperious despite the clammy sweat that had broken out over his skin; and that was when the EMTs bustled into the store.

~*~

Mrs Ackroyd taught Jim English when he was thirteen. She was a woman with a great determination to expand the vocabulary her students used in their essays, which was why Jim knew that he didn’t hate hospitals so much as he abhorred them. Lives were saved in them every day, and lives were lost, and if Jim paid too much attention to the noises and the smells it was like a cockroach crawling on his skin under his pants leg.

Better to pay attention to Blair who lay in a hospital with his wounds finally dealt with, and one arm hooked up to threads of water and antibiotics.

“I’m officially taking your statement, Chief.”

Blair frowned. “I don’t know....”

“Don’t know what?” Jim said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.

Blair sighed. “If I asked for someone else you’d just check out my statement anyway.”

Jim shifted on the hard, hospital chair. “Any particular reason you don’t want me to take your statement?”

Blair’s eyes were very blue, set in all the white surrounding him. White walls, white bedding, white face, and then a little pink of embarrassment coloured his skin. “You’re going to chew me out because you’re pissed off I got hurt, and it was not my fault.” He sounded like a sulky adolescent explaining away the ding in the borrowed family car.

Jim rested his face in his hand a moment. “For crying out loud, Sandburg. I am not going to chew you out, scold you, or in any other way reproach you. Happy now?”

Blair looked distinctly sceptical. “Nope, can’t say that I am. But you’re still waiting on my statement, right?”

“Right,” Jim confirmed, and laid the small recorder on the bed.

Blair looked at it with dislike, before he shut his eyes and began a recital of events, most of which Jim already knew. He knew it from the mark on the face of the store manager, Jennifer Chan, and her barely controlled hysteria while talking to the police. Barbara’s shock had taken a colder, almost prissy form, but there had been undisguised revulsion in her tone as she’d watched Blair being loaded into the ambulance. She’d put her hand out, halting Jim in his move to follow Blair out of the store. “My nephew collects bowie knives,” she had said. “They look almost pretty on display. Smaller.” She had shivered then. Her clothes would probably be unsalvageable and she hadn’t had a chance to wash her hands. “It was expensive. Stolen, I expect.”

Jim had briefly clasped her filthy hands in his, and whispered, “Thank you,” in her ear, before he’d run for his truck and followed the ambulance to the hospital, to Mercy, which dealt competently with Blair despite his fears.

“The guy, he was pricking the knife on her face just under her eye and she was freaking out, absolutely freaking out, and I figured that maybe I could distract him, or her. I was... pissed off. The guy stank of booze and he getting off on how scared she was.” Blair sounded shaky – they were getting to the difficult part now. It wasn’t standard procedure to grab the witness’s hand and grip tight, but Jim did it anyway. “I don’t actually remember, what I said. Probably something dumb like ‘Hey, you don’t want to do that,’ which, yeah, so dumb, and the guy whirled around, no warning, no threats, and stabbed me twice. Really fast, and I just stood there and looked, didn’t even try to stop him, I was so surprised.” Blair was silent for a while.

“What then?” Jim asked gently.

“To be honest, I thought that was it, I thought he was going to go slasher movie on me, but he panicked, I guess. Realised exactly what he’d done, or hell, maybe he was afraid of blood, man, I don’t know. Next thing, he ran out of the store like his ass was on fire.”

He had been drunk, Blair’s attacker. He was known in the neighbourhood, a wannabe tough guy who’d been more of a petty thief until he’d gotten liquored up and played with his pretty, stolen bowie knife and nearly killed someone. Nearly killed Blair.

“And the rest you know. Barbara got the towel and stopped me from bleeding to death, and I have to find out her surname and send her some flowers or something.”

“I can organise that for you,” Jim said. He picked up the recorder with his free hand and turned it off. “I’ll get this typed up, and bring it back for you to sign.”

“Sure,” Blair said, and squeezed Jim’s hand. They sat quietly for a while in that white hospital room. “Still no reproaches, huh. Jim Ellison is a man of his word.”

Jim shrugged. It had been like a movie behind his eyes while Blair was talking – Jennifer Chan, with the blood running down her face, and Blair, more furious than frightened at the banal, petty evil, and then astonished as a six inch blade stabbed viciously into his gut.

“Yeah, that’s right, Chief.”

“You’ve been stabbed too.”

Jim nodded.

“So, come on. Tell me all the gory details. Soldiering or policing?”

Jim withdrew his hand from Blair’s. “You’re a glutton for punishment.”

Blair’s eyes sparked with amusement and a touch of irritation. “I’m a glutton for knowledge.”

Jim shook his head. “I wish I could say it was something classified, but it wasn’t. It was a stupid bar fight. I wasn’t even out of the country.”

Blair’s hand patted the mattress in a weird, Sandburgian gesture of encouragement. “ _All_ the details, man. All of them.”

He was still pale, and Jim knew that he must be sore as hell, but Blair’s face was vibrantly alive with the pleasure of worming information out of Jim Ellison. It was stupid, because Jim knew that he’d led Blair into situations where he could have ended up equally dead, but somehow it seemed worse that Blair nearly died over something as inconsequential as a desire to save a few cents on some sesame candies.

Something of that inner emotion crossed his face. “Is it a bad memory?” Blair asked, unsure suddenly.

“It wasn’t fun, but no, it’s not a bad memory. I wouldn’t have said anything if it was.”

Blair brightened. “Well, then, come on. I want to compare notes, man. Shared experiences, male bonding.” His face turned affectionate, and slightly suspicious. “You look like you’re thinking of backing out. Is the story that embarrassing?” He grinned. “Not as heroic as my situation, huh?”

Jim settled back in his chair, hideously grateful for the teasing, and decided that for a Blair who was alive and soon to be well that he could tell a story from when he was young and stupid.

“No, Chief,” he said easily. “Not as heroic as your situation.”


End file.
